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Ida opened up a window in every room and inhaled deep exaggerated breaths of the December air. It was raining out and cold but the air had the sweet humidity, rare in Colorado, that reminded her of the South. She imagined the smell of the gulf waters and the birds drove her wild with a joyful energy. She’d run around the house sniffing at the air and then set a while with a mug of very hot strong coffee and closed her eyes and visualized a steamy jungle full of color and loud exotic birds that fanned her with the flap of huge wings. In fact, the breeze was chilling her bones and soon she built a crackling pine fire to warm her, sitting right up next to it, but still not ready to close the windows.
Adam was on a road trip with Lance and Bobby. They’d driven to Las Vegas Nevada to the National Pro-Rodeo finals. Ida knew her son hoped to make it as a contestant one day before he got too old for it. Ida never went to see her son compete, said it made her nervous and he said that was fine with him because she made him nervous, making a big deal outta thanking God every time he came home all in one piece and he made a big deal telling her God had nothing to do with it because he, Lance, was damn good at what he did.
Ida knew he’d change when he had kids of his own and he’d realize then how much a parent had to depend on God and pay attention to the signals. “Signals” is what Ida called “signs” or “omens” and perhaps she took it quite literally as directions to turn one way or another or stop altogether. The one and only time she’d ever gone to a rodeo was at the big Denver Coliseum during Stock Show on a bleak, snowy, muddy January Saturday at dusk and sure enough a calf got its neck broke during the roping. A vet had rushed out into the arena to supervise the carrying off of the animal on a stretcher and not much later an announcer told the crowd the calf was OK but Ida knew that was a lie told to appease the environmentalists and humane society folks. That calf had lain too long and still and stiff on the ground not to be dead. Ida figured better a calf than some woman’s son and she took it as a warning sign and she never went to another rodeo and tried to convince Lance to give it up but he never did listen to her. Treated her good in every other respect she had to admit but he never did take her advice about anything ever, not even when the boy was killed riding the bull in Greeley. Lance just told her he could as easily get killed driving on the Boulder Turnpike but she didn’t want him to quit visiting her anymore did she? And that was the way of it.
Two days later Bobby’s ma came over and knocked and when Ida went to the door she put a postcard up for her to see and Ida opened the door slowly, suspiciously but she took the postcard and Mrs. Quiggley said a little stiffly, “Just thought you’d be interested,” and went back on home. Ida read the card. It didn’t say much: “Hi folks, just so you know we are fine. –Bobby” and it was from Arches National Park in Utah and had a picture of red rocks on the back. Lance had sent her a much better card (did that woman think her son couldn’t write?) from Green River and said the boys were tired so he planned to stop the night in Richfield and head out for Vegas in the morning. They’d only just left the day they mailed the cards and would probably be back home the night the cards were received. Ida thought Bobby’s ma was making a fuss over nothing. Both women got postcards showing lots of scenes of Vegas, bright lights and show girls in sequins (and not much else) and what appeared to be hundreds of people throwing money down slot machines.
When they got back, Lance like to complain about all the money wasted while folks were hungry on the streets here, there too: plenty of homeless and destitute right there in Vegas, mixed in with all the high rollers, “Maybe they were high rollers the day before yesterday,” muttered Ida as he talked.
Come good weather Lance said he wanted to take Adam to see the Grand Canyon and hit some of those small town rodeos on the reservations. Lance said them Indians sure could ride. Ida knew he’d probably take Bobby too, anymore that boy went everywhere with Lance and Adam and that scared her as much as the bulls and the broncs. A voice told her something bad was going to happen, not God talking this time, just something she remembered, something from herself.
When Ida was pregnant with Lance, overdue by then and big as a whale, Marcus took her to St. Louis to meet his mother. She couldn’t believe it: She’d always imagined him just appearing on earth on the end of a sunbeam or a bolt of lightening, nothing ordinary about his appearance on the stage of life, but he had a mother it turned out he hadn’t seen in some years and wanted her to see her grandson and the other one on the way. They didn’t stay long because the mother was very drunk and went from cheerful and over-excited to hostile and mean in a hurry. She was the most grotesque individual Ida had ever laid eyes on. She wore very brightly colored clothes too tight even on her emaciated bones and an abundance of make-up, including false eyelashes, that contrasted with her wizened skin and toothless mouth in a way that was comical or tragic, Ida couldn’t decide which. Marcus was actually embarrassed.
A few days after they had left and just before Lance was born, Marcus got the letter that his mother had died (maybe it was the liver, maybe the heart, probably both, she’d been drinking herself to death for more years than most people get) and he cried for a whole night. Ida couldn’t reach him, didn’t understand. He cried in the nights for the first month of Lance’s life. And then a year later it started all over again, the anniversary of the death she guessed and she couldn’t do anything for his loss, not so much the loss of his mother as the total lack of any good memories of her. Marcus was very tender to Ida and the boys then, but she heard the voice, from herself, an all-seeing psychic kind of self that said he was leaving and then, sure enough, he was gone.
So Ida knew that something bad was going to happen.
How does a mother protect her children? Is it necessary to remain in constant conversation with god? To beg constantly for divine intervention and be constantly aware that the life beyond one’s arms is truly a minefield? To fill the cosmos with such palpable anxiety that it literally creates a barrier between the beloved and disaster? Ida thought so. Her own widowed father had shown her so little affection, none that she could actually remember, and had restricted her childhood and adolescence with such a stern ferocity that she had felt righteous leaving him and her guilt turned to hatred until her own children were old enough to cause her panic and then she knew that he had loved her and she forgave him and even wrote him a letter that didn’t begin to say it all, but that didn’t matter because a neighbor returned her letter with a brief note giving the date of his death whereupon she sent him her message through God and good for her that she’d found God by then.
In late May and early June Lance took the boys to some brandings, sometimes for pay sometimes for sociable and that was good hard work, real work with no time for unnecessary dangers and Ida relaxed. But then, with barely a pause for breath and clean laundry, they were off again to the rodeos. Ida kept a map on the kitchen table and every evening she’d talk to God and tell him where he was needed: in Holbrook/Joseph city, Arizona where the power plant lit up the nights with a vision of hell—when Lance was there that god-forsaken strip of route 40 was blessed, in Gallup, New Mexico and Shiprock and Farmington, in Del Norte, Pueblo and Greeley closer to home, wherever Lance went to risk his neck for a dream she could neither understand nor accept.
The town of Cimarron half way between Raton and Taos came to life once a year on the Fourth of July when generations of its children who had left ten, twenty, thirty years before returned to recognize one another, share a few beers and re-live old memories. The rodeo got off to a leisurely start after the parade ended and lasted right up until it was time to get cleaned up for the fireworks and the dance. The organizers could be forgiven for drawing out as long as possible its one day of glory. Contestants came from southern Colorado and straight down I-25 from Cheyenne, all over New Mexico and small towns in west Texas and Amarillo too. Occasionally the announcer would introduce a bronc or a bull rider from as far as Nebra
ska or Alabama.
Ida’s eyes searched her map the morning of the 4th. She followed the broad red line down from Trinidad to Raton, Springer and Wagon Mound and then all around the little grey lines finding Ocate and Angel Fire and Agua Fria, Eagle Nest and Ute Park and then she found Cimarron in the middle and concentrated on her conversation with God, imagining the announcer making bad jokes and the clowns running around keeping the bucking animals away from fallen cowboys.